Recent developments in the communications technology area have made it possible to contact people in a variety of ways. A decade or two ago, the most common means for contacting people was by mail, personal meetings, or telephone conversations. These days, however, there is also a variety other options, such as e-mail, mobile phones, text chat, video chat, office phone, home phone, just to mention a few.
While the advent of these new technologies has increased the availability of people, it has also created a problem for people who are trying to initiate contact with someone, since the person trying to initiate contact may not know what the best way would be to reach the other person at any given time. For example, the other person might be at his office desk, in his car, at home, in a meeting, or somewhere else. At each of these places there may be more or less appropriate ways of being contacted.
Some solutions for dealing with such issues have been developed on an application or device basis. For example, chat applications typically allow a user to manually set a status, such as “available,” “busy,” or “away from my desk,” and so on. Users can also typically set up so called “auto-responders” in their email systems, which automatically send an automatic reply message whenever a message is received, informing the sender that the recipient, for example, is out on vacation. Telephone calls can also be set manually by a user to be directed to voicemail, where a message is played to the caller, informing the caller about the recipient's current status, and so on. All of these systems have in common that they must be set or reset manually by a user.
One approach, albeit inefficient, can send a ping to all the places where a recipient can be reached, and wherever the recipient happens to be, he answers the ping through an appropriate device. A drawback with such systems is that they are often noisy and bother other people, for example, if the office phone keeps ringing, while the chat application on the user's computer beeps and the email system signals an incoming email, and so on.
Another solution can have a recipient define a static fall-over list. This list can contain instructions, for example, to first try to call the office phone, and if no one answers, try the mobile phone, then e-mail, and so on. A drawback to this solution is that the caller might not be aware that such a fall-over list exists, and subsequently assume that the recipient is not available and hang up after a short time, that is, before the fall-over list has been completely processed.
Thus, there remains a need for better mechanisms for assisting people to contact one another.